three person poly relationship made up of two people who are already dating trying to coax someone with horrific self worth issues into a loving relationship. stray cat style

they’re all laying together in bed and the couple are both thinking to themselves like good, he stayed the night to cuddle and talk when we offered, he should know that we genuinely care for him and want this to be more then a handful of one night stands. and the stray cat guy is like wow this sure is nice i think i’m falling in love with them. it’s really too bad that they don’t actually give a fuck and hate me and probably want to kill me with hammers for no reason

it has been like. two days

delighted to inform you all that the fake identity hardison sets up for eliot in the hot potato job (and then has to hurriedly adapt for sophie) lists him as six feet, two to three inches taller than his actual height. I can only assume that this is part of a longer pattern of teasing eliot about his height and seeing how much variation he can get away with.

It's part of Hardison's dastardly plan to force Eliot to fight in platform shoes. Probably because it somehow came up on another job, and Eliot insisted he could and/or had fought in platform shoes, and Hardison is either skeptical or simply thinks it would be entertaining to watch.

inexplicably one of my favorite dynamics in the show. normal people conversations

All of Eliot's fight scenes would be 1000x more entertaining if they were accompanied by Billy Joel's Uptown Girl

you're the smartest person on this website actually

Leverage 4x8- "The Boiler Room Job"

oh I do love the Leverage Gloat when the mark has only met one or two of the leveragers. POV you are being arrested for corporate malfeasance and your company’s inept new IT guy, a european duchess, and three random weirdos are lined up with their arms folded smugly like a boyband

nate: sophie, how do you catch mob guys?

sophie: two glasses of chianti and a story about my grandma in sicily ;)

nate: how does the fbi catch mob guys?

sophie devereaux the woman that you are (also i love that nate just ignores that entirely lmao).

Leverage 1x8 - "The Mile High Job"

so… like… is there a flight attendant out there who thinks they’ve witnessed a mile high three way get very out of hand?

i was excited to go to bed early but now i’m just lying awake desperately trying to reconcile the conflicting moral stances of different episodes into a coherent idea of what constitutes a “good guy.”

yeah im gonna be here a while

honestly i don’t think “good guys don’t kill people” was actually a rule until season 3, when they realized they needed a clearer moral line to help sell the conflict with moreau

oh interesting.

last rewatch I think I felt it was murkier than that. eliot's implied to still kill people beyond s3 (the catching-up with vance we see in 5.1 must have had a body count) but maybe that falls under him doing what the rest of the team can't, and not quite holding himself to the same standards - especially not to nate's. and we do see flashback sophie poisoning a dude in the rashomon job (s3), but maybe that falls under the general convention that Medical Situations (especially concussions) are much less dangerous in the show than real life. maybe it was just that it was indirect, and she expected him to probably survive.

(maybe, since neither were doing leverage work at the time, it just doesn't count.)

I think I always assumed it was about intent. not just about what they're doing, but about how they go about what they're doing. the big bang job isn't just that eliot kills: it's that he picks up a gun expecting and planning to, far more easily than, perhaps, a person should be able to. those people were dead the moment he stepped out to meet them with that plan in his mind. (and arguably, he'd already killed the guy he took the gun from, though I'm told that neck grabs can be disturbingly crunchy without necessarily being fatal.) the job with vance? more a case of collateral damage for a "worthy" cause.

but I kind of feel that canon left this messier (in an unacknowledged way) than a good story should be - fanon takes on eliot's situation, at least, seem a bit more coherent to me than what we might actually have in canon. but perhaps he, more than the others, simply isn't capable of being a Good Man anymore.

(apologies for the focus on eliot here, but in a discussion of the team's morality and killing people, he sure does spring to mind!)

plugging my own review because i have never been nor will i ever be normal about leverage season 5, episode 9: the rundown job

i loveeee love love tara’s first appearance in leverage. firstly, no one asked her to do all of that. sophie very much did not say "hey why don’t you pretend to be a random civilian, take the time to make a foolproof alias that a team of highly competent thieves won’t see through, not explain that i’ve vouched for you, and run an entire extra con on top of participating in the job they’re currently doing?". and while yeah, she was checking their team out, she knew she was gonna help out to return a favour to sophie anyway! obsessed with that choice. secondly, she immediately starts pissing nate off on purpose, the second she meets him. just for the fun of it. she’s the funniest person alive actually lmaooo